Something happens to memory. Even now, I have to ask myself: was it after his birth or hers that X happened, or Y occurred? In the past, when I acquired other significant objects – a car, a home, jobs – the experience was vividly recalled, all events either side of the moment. The first months of parenthood roll by and there are home nurse visits, vaccinations in clinics, the first time leaving the house, carrying all ‘the stuff’, terrified. In this recollection there are few details. Nothing about dates, except what the calendar dutifully informs me of. A new phase under a dictatorship, a tiny benign autocrat rules all. In the night, listening to his sucking milk gulps, I imagine tanks rolling onto our street.
Children veer erratically from massive dependency to rogue strikes out on their own. They know nothing and everything. I marvel at their smallness that contains so much. Organs and bone all in miniature. One day, a glance up and there they are: expressing preferences and offering opinions. Time has transmogrified: the accidental iTunes fast-forward that turns everyone into staccato cartoon singers. Clipping moon-slivers of baby nails to stop them scratching, then watching the same hands carry a too-heavy rucksack, crossing schoolyard tarmac. The feelings coalesce: sadness mixed with relief that they are at this point and you have managed not to break them. Returning home, the house is desolately empty, but that quiet – Oh the quiet! – means work, and words. I learn to co-exist as mother and worker, mother and writer. A person who can be cave deep in words and the second they are needed, closes the laptop or puts down the pen, summoned to the cot, the garden, the school.
II
The problem with motherhood is that it is so rarely divorced from parenthood. For mothers, parenthood is more than just the state of being a parent, surpassing the reductiveness of nine-month gestation and the credit-roll denouement of birth. Birth is merely the beginning of an eternal commitment to the demands of nurture. After breast or bottle, after nestling into the new groove carved by something that came from inside us, there is responsibility.
A woman’s life is often inexorably directed towards the making of a child. Historically, fertility was as valuable as wealth. Barrenness was marginally less socially ostracizing than being a spinster. Today, the anachronistic idea persists that a woman is not fully a woman until she is a mother. This is another spoke in the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t wheel of patriarchy. Personhood predates motherhood. An individual exists long before having children. This is perhaps what causes a distinct recoiling in me when other women, who happen to be parents, say, As a mother. As a mother . . . what? Growing two babies in my uterus did not bring with it Solomon levels of wisdom. Arguably I am now less wise than I was without children. My edge has been slightly sanded down, along with some of my freedom. Conversely, I am better with time, that thing that morphed and changed like a horror-film spook with their arrival. To still be yourself, the person you were before becoming a parent, is both an easy continuation and difficult to transmit. Somewhere in between there is a recalibration.
Press hold to stop time (me, always).
Hold to press skin (me, in the dark with you).
The conflict between mother and individual, mother and worker, mother and writer, became quickly evident. Freelance work life resumed eight weeks after my son was born because of financial necessity. When he slept – a rarity – I would frantically write 150-word album reviews, which was the limit of all I could ask of my brain. Desperately trying to remember words to describe guitars and choruses. I wasn’t a writer yet, which eased one responsibility off my shoulders. This is not an acknowledgement of trite terms like baby brain or momnesia, but a sense that words were lost to me. That it would have been impossible to gather up thousands of them, enough for a book’s worth. To shape and swap and arrange them into something coherent.
Personhood, Parenthood. The words swim into each other. The immersive first years settle and then the self pulls away a little further year after year. One autumn, when they are both at school, I sit at an antique desk, looking out at beech trees and the dark grey of a lake. The late afternoon shifts. I am bunkered down at an artists’ retreat that is landlocked and remote, two hours from home. I first applied and was offered a place here two years before this moment but could never make it happen. Now, I attempt to put one word in front of the other, while looking out at a lake. As I face into the 3 p.m. slump, a comment floats up out of nowhere.
‘But what about your kids?’
It was said casually, of course, when I explained my intention to go away to write. Now it was amplified: not only had I abandoned my children, but here I was in the Irish countryside having notions about writing. All creative urges were instantly replaced by maternal guilt. The audacity of me heading off alone. The added implication being that my husband is incapable of minding our children solo for a handful of days.
This enquiry, as we are all well aware, is based on several gendered assumptions: that women are the primary caregivers, and that writers (really, men) need their unchallenged space to write big, important tomes. At arts festivals, moderators ask women who write, without a jot of awareness, about ‘the juggle’, while male authors, looking serious, stare off into the distance. On the same panels, in libraries and marquees and town halls, no one turns to the men who write books and enquire about childcare arrangements, or the wives and partners who step up to facilitate their writing.
Every night at the retreat the guests – writers, composers, artists – sit down to dinner. Someone observes that only the women speak about their children, and of supportive partners holding the fort. One woman, an artist, admits that she had loaded up the freezer with pre-made dinners so her husband wouldn’t have to cook for himself. Only the women around the table debate the conflict between finding time to create and fulfilling parental obligation. Every one of us delighted to be here, to be without demand or expectation. To power down motherhood, and throw up the switch on writer. There is an affable male poet, also escaping his day job, who says he always sleeps for his first two days here. I am here for five days. Every second will count. I cannot afford two days of sleeping instead of words.
This abundance of time and space is new to me. I am not used to writing for nine hours, and my concentration regularly dips. In one trough, I read Zadie Smith’s essay ‘Find Your Beach’, a meditation on city life, which also explores her overlapping roles of mother and writer: ‘My lovely children who eat all my time, the books unread and unwritten.’ I read ‘F for Fone in the Winter Papers journal, where Claire Kilroy writes that motherhood has made her life ‘an angry few years [. . .] Writing used to be the answer to all my problems [. . .] but now I can no longer write.’ Everyone who writes, and has children, can relate to these blood-and-guts stories of creativity and priorities. Of longing for headspace instead of playdates, and feeling guilty for it. The writer protagonist in Jenny Offill’s novel Dept of Speculation is caught between wanting to be ‘an art monster’ and her role as a mother. She bumps into an editor she once knew, who says casually that he must have missed the publication of the character’s second book. When the writer explains that there isn’t one, he asks kindly: ‘Did something happen?’ ‘Yes,’ she says firmly, downplaying the fact that her writing has been sidelined by the circular loop of motherhood.
You do not have to be a writer to relate to any of this. Offill’s words chime with every parent – those who commute to work and those who stay at home to raise families; those in factories or offices, in schools, shops or labs. I feel this too, we say. This is my life.
Virginia Woolf, who was far removed from the work and grind of daily life, made generations of writers think that they’re entitled to a room of their own. At home, my desk is in a room full of books, read and unread, that sit next to Lego and other various toys. Our lives push up against each other. There are hundreds of sentences in this book written when my children wander in to chat, or tell tales on each other. Their voices echo all over the house and it’s impossible not to tune into it. I can foc
us, but my daughter’s songs carry, as do my son’s conversations with the dog, in that voice he saves just for this creature. But still I go back to finding words and fitting them together. I start to see the shape of what I’m trying to build, word by word.
III
In the kitchen, my daughter is dancing to a song. Later, in the shower, her voice filters down the stairs, note-bending impressions of St Vincent, Adele, or a rotating cast of tween singers. Various FIFA soundtracks have brought Major Lazer and Tune-Yards into my son’s life, a bonus for me. Together, they watch TV chart countdowns, squabble over number one predictions. They ask me to take them to music festivals that they are much too young for. Their lives are full of music, but that started a long time ago. For some, memories are invoked by smell or images, but it’s music that always performs some sort of alchemy, or archaeology, on my brain.
Recently, I heard Ms Dynamite’s ‘Dy-Na-Mi-Tee’ again and relived one November day, when it had been playing on the car radio. I was newly pregnant, and my husband was driving us to our son’s first scan. In the passenger seat, tears welled up and caught me off guard. Crying mostly out of fear, of being told that once again, my body would not be up to the task, ambushed by something bad and unexpected. In the dim light of the consultant’s room (we are never more vulnerable than when we’re lying down) I was fully ready to hear awful news. But there he was, boldly circling the screen like an aerial performer. Months later, in the dome of my belly, he turned somersaults at a Joanna Newsom gig, as did his sister at Kraftwerk a year later (the fact that she was ‘there’, and not him, still causes spats). Every time I hear that Ms Dynamite song, I think of him, and that terrifying scan, and – after so many years of health complications – how much we wanted him.
When we finally got to meet him, he was a tiny insomniac. I played songs to soothe him – Amiina, Sigur Rós – rowing his buggy back and forth like a boat on the waves. He and his sister have grown like trees, through their many music phases, picked up by osmosis: The Ramones, Beyoncé, Vampire Weekend, lots of hip hop, Kendrick Lamar. My heart burst the day my son asked for ‘Wuthering Heights’ on repeat. Now, older, they’re finding their own musical tastes. Figuring out the beats that tap on their soul, the harmonies that weave in and out of them, the rhythms they floss and dab to.
Milestones arrive with alarming frequency. Every time something new develops in them – height, unfamiliar words, the discarding of once-loved toys that are now ‘for babies’ – it feels like a little loss. My son walked to the shops on his own for the first time recently, and with it, another premonition of him eventually out in the world on his own. Whenever these changes come, fast as a bullet train, it feels as though everything is shifting too quickly into the past. That I will have to let them go a little further away from me every year. That my protection is finite, and the years are moving forward with cosmic speed.
Another milestone arrives in the shape of their first big gig. Tickets have been bought for Justin Bieber and for weeks before the event, they ask to see those white paper rectangles over and over. A month before, many children are killed at an Ariana Grande show in Manchester. There is collective incomprehension at all that optimism and youth obliterated. As infants, children learn that music is safety and security; that sung words and melodies are as protective as a wall. Now they’re becoming aware that there are people who want to shatter that normalcy. They have lots of questions about Manchester. It is hard to talk to people you love about an act of intentional hate. We get ready for Bieber and they ask why we cannot bring a rucksack for the treats they’ve carefully selected. I mutter about the heat, and crowd safety, because who wants to mention bombs on a night full of such smiling anticipation? We drive across the city to the venue and I realise it is the same one where I saw my first big gig (R.E.M. on the Green Tour with The Go-Betweens as support). In the throng, my daughter nervously regards the crowd size, but is transfixed by the older girls around us. They start to dance, and shyly she copies their moves, punching the air, gasping at the fireworks. Teen girls could rule the world, with all their energy. So much effort has been put into outfits, tans and complicated face sequins. I watch these girls, who adore each other, elated and confident, roaming the toilet and ice-cream queues, all swishing hair and linked arms. My daughter watches them forensically, a longing to be one of them etched on her face. Wishing to be here with her own friends, not her mother and brother. In every one of the girls, I see her in six or seven years’ time.
Music binds us together. It is a centre point of life’s key events – birthdays, weddings and funerals; it consoles us when someone stomps all over our heart; it is the source of spontaneous dancing with friends (as a kid, or when you’re older, after much wine). And pop, perennially scoffed at with its sugary vibes and Auto-Tune, has much to offer, especially when seen through the eyes of those with so much love for it.
Nothing can trump the vitality and possibility of young boys and girls watching a singer they revere. Music is a constant in times of uncertainty and chaos, a needle on an eternal groove; offering communion, connection. It is being under the lights when a thousand phones held aloft look like a galaxy of stars; feeling the thunder rumble of the bass in your chest; buying a band T-shirt and wearing it until it falls apart; counting the hours to school the next day to tell your friends that you were there, because you were: collective voices singing on the breeze of a still-bright school night. This is the first of many gigs, of sharing the night with strangers who love music as much as they do.
IV
Music is the reason my children used to be obsessed with death. But only death in the abstract sense, when it was something that only happened to famous people, not those we love. Until Terry, or my best friend’s young husband. It transpired that their interest in the subject was not about the ending of a life, but of someone not being here any more. They began to ask constant questions about people from history, from music, from the films we watched together. They found it reassuring if someone they’d just discovered was still somewhere in the world, inhaling and exhaling, travelling, working, writing songs.
Is Elvis dead? Is Willy Wonka dead? Is Michael Jackson dead? Is Mary Robinson dead? Is Stevie Wonder dead? Is Bill Clinton dead? Is the guy who sang ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ dead?
Is David Bowie dead?
Until January 2016, I was able to say with breezy relief that Bowie, in all his heterochromic glory, was still with us. They were very sad when he was not.
Conversations about religion are complicated. My husband and I are not religious. Our children are not baptised, and are fine with this, but religion is part of the school curriculum. We answer their questions, teach them to be respectful of believers, and do not sway their opinion. One day, they may believe and we will support that. Not long after my son had started school, he declared out of nowhere, with a Nietzschean fervour, ‘I think God is an eejit.’
And they ask about heaven. I have no knowledge of a place I don’t believe in. Instead, I talk about the night sky, swapping theology for astronomy. I present them with stars in place of Stations of the Cross. On my phone, there’s a star app, which we point at the sky in search of planets and celestial bodies. The city lights frequently obscure the view, but the stars always show up on this screen, technology undeterred by cloud cover. We tilt and roll the app, looking for the Big Dipper, the Seven Sisters, the flattened W of Cassiopeia. With the little I know, I talk of supernovas and quasars. In Italy, on a mountaintop, the four of us watch a blood moon rise, with Mars hovering close by. They’ll grow out of this soon; of thinking their parents have all the answers. They will realise the size of the globe, begin to dream of all the places they’ll want to see. The stars will be here long after all of us, I tell them, wherever we may go. I cannot speak for heaven.
The Haunted Haunting Women
I see women coming over the hills, walking down into the towns and cities. Pulling coats with missing buttons tighter, balancing babies on worn hi
ps, saving pennies and counting cents, not shaking off the boss’s hand when it lingers too long, the multiple jobs, or work turned down, rounding the corner with a buggy only to find a flight of steps, criss-crossing the supermarket aisles with stop, stop, stop asking me, wiping noses, and undrunk, cold cups of tea, pristine kitchens, lives without a spare minute to stare at the sky, fury simmering in their heads.
I see one woman in particular. All the moments of her life piled up like bones. The countless actions, the days of her youth she recounts to us, a drip-feed of her past. In the midst of all those addresses and moods and cigarettes, all those sighs and each-way horse bets, she is embodied by two things: weeds and ghosts.
It was spring, and in the back garden, my grandmother pulled up dandelions from the lawn. There were never any flowers in this garden, save for this unwelcome yellow. Tearing up roots, pulling ‘piss-the-beds’ from the soil. My grandfather records that she walked back into the house, leaving the sunshine over the coal shed, and just collapsed. They’d shared a bed for fifty years and he knew her breathing, each rise and fall of it, but he’d never heard her breathe like this. A not-her, pneumatic snore. My mother arrived and her brain, flooded with panic, dialled 888 over and over, wondering why she couldn’t get through. Why there was no calm, factual voice saying: ‘Emergency Services – which service do you require?’ At the hospital, a doctor declared it a catastrophic heart attack. That morning, she had smoked half a cigarette, extinguishing it with her bare fingers, for later. As the paramedics worked on her, the upright blackened butt looked down from the mantelpiece.
Constellations Page 10